How Kathleen Hanna Bonded with Hayley Williams over Email Before Their Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Chat (Exclusive)

Backstage at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, feminist punk icon Kathleen Hanna was glammed to the gods, sporting a hairstyle she describes as a “bird cage” on top of her head. “Courtesy of the Rock Hall; they did this to me,” she said with a grin.

The Bikini Kill and Le Tigre singer had just hopped off stage after interviewing Paramore’s Hayley Williams in front of a sold-out crowd, a conversation celebrating Women’s History Month, and the Rock Hall’s new Revolutionary Women in Music exhibit.

The cost to witness this on-stage interview in the flesh on Saturday, March 8 clocked in at $100 per ticket, selling out in just 20 minutes. 

“Oh my God, I love Hayley Williams,” Hanna, 56, raved to PEOPLE following their chat. “She is so funny, and so smart, and articulate about her music. She’s such a music lover.” The pair share palpable BFF energy, to the point it’s almost unbelievable that they’ve only just met.

“We had just emailed a couple of times,” Hanna explains. “Like, ‘Hey, I like your work’ — that kind of thing. Never met her until tonight. And then I wrote her to see if she would blurb my book. And she was like, ‘Oh yeah, totally.'”

Hanna’s New York Times bestselling memoir Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk (out in paperback on June 24), is a raw-to-the-bone account of her life and a detailed look at her early work leading “Riot grrrl,” the feminist punk movement she spearheaded in the ’90s through her first band, Bikini Kill. 

Williams, 36, was visibly honored to be in Hanna’s presence throughout the interview, holding her hand over her heart and gasping at each sincere compliment Hanna paid her. 

“She kept writing emails,” Hanna continued about Williams to PEOPLE. “She was like, ‘Hey, this is how I feel about this part of the book, and this is what it made me feel.'” She said Williams’ encouraging insights came at the perfect time. “I really was isolated at the time because I was at the end of turning the book in and about to go on the tour. And I’d been really kind of by myself finishing it,” she explained.

“I really didn’t have anybody to talk to — you know, my husband was sick of hearing about it,” she admitted with a laugh about her partner, Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, a.k.a. Ad-Rock. “I really was like, I can’t put this on him anymore because I’ve talked about the book so much.”

Last year, Hanna told Vulture that writing the memoir was so painful that she attended therapy twice a week because of it, receiving a C-PTSD diagnosis while working on it. 

On top of that, the pressure to fully relay her life’s story was daunting. “When you’re finishing up a project, you’re like, ‘Does this totally suck?’ Then all of a sudden I had this person, Hayley, telling me like, ‘Hey, this is important. This is good.'”

It’s hard to overstate Hanna’s role in leading the third-wave feminist movement of the early ’90s.  When asked how one might avoid burning out on activism so many decades later, Hanna said it’s about taking time to rest and using your intuition. 

“Isn’t that what all these motherf—ers are trying to shut off? [They’re] trying to turn our intuition off and make us think that feminism’s over, that it’s already been done. Like, we don’t need DEI anymore because racism and sexism is over. Well, the fact that you’re stripping away our rights is letting us know it’s the opposite of over,” she said with a laugh.

Though Hanna’s influence on music is omnipresent, some of her early influences on music are often overlooked. One major but older example involves the Spice Girls. 

At the top of the ’90s, Bikini Kill distributed “fanzines” filled with information and art about the punk feminist movement. One of them was titled “Girl Power,” the term now famously popularized by the Spice Girls in the late ’90s. 

When asked how that felt at the time, Hanna told PEOPLE, “Yeah, it was very weird to be like 26, 27, and completely broke, and then there were these five girls who are everywhere. They had these outfits that I would have killed for. I was like, ‘I want a sequined outfit that has ‘girl power’ on it!'” she joked.

“When I got older, I was like, it’s kind of cool that these young girls were looking up to this band that was singing about, ‘I don’t give a s— about my boyfriend, what I care about is my friends,’ because that’s a lot of people’s lived experience.”

Hanna said the experience also gave her an education into what many people in music had already experienced on much larger scales, particularly Black artists. “Here we are in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and — Black artists invented rock and roll but are so often not the people to benefit financially,” she pointed out. “I was like, ‘Oh, actually, I could use this to maybe understand a teeny, tiny part of what some other people have gone through.'”

Though decades into her career, the seemingly fearless singer said she still gets nervous before she gets on stage. “I just always remind myself I’m gonna die. What am I gonna do while I’m here? Tomorrow, I might die.'”

Hanna continued, “I feel like I owe it to people to live life and to not hide and to not like just, you know, sit in my dirty baby diaper, whining about s—. And I mean, we all do need to sit in our dirty diapers and whine about sh—sometimes, but to not stay stuck there… If you’re not gonna go out and really be human and flawed in front of people and speak truth to power, then what’s the point? You can die tomorrow being like, ‘Oh, I said everything right.'”